


vicissitudes

by JaguarCello



Series: Malfeasance [2]
Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: F/M, M/M, Sibling Incest, post-bacchanalia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 09:59:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1222060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaguarCello/pseuds/JaguarCello
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The waiting had begun to worm its way into the dark corners of their souls, to expose their loathsome secrets, turning them over like insects wriggling in the sudden light of an upturned stone, and Camilla thought she had the most loathsome secret of all.<br/>It turned out that, when playing a chess-master, one must remember to polish one's pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	vicissitudes

Henry lit a cigarette, and his glasses flashed in the brief spark from his match; his eyes were hidden in shadow. Camilla watched him, and although he was sat next to her on the wooden slats of an old picnic bench, it seemed to her as if there were miles or millennia between them. The wind moved the clematis which trailed up the trellis, blowing the last of their scents – blowsy now and tired – across to where they sat.

“He will kill me, you know,” he said quietly, each word said so precisely that anyone else would have suspected him of preparing it. Camilla knew better, and waited until he had lifted his head, and then sniffed, drawing her blanket-cape more closely around her shoulders. A moth fluttered towards his cigarette, and then spiralled away, caught in the wind; Camilla’s hair blew across her face like a mask, and her eyes still burned into him.

“I wouldn’t let that happen,” she began, taking his cigarette from him to bloke smoke-plumes of her own to the heavens, throat bared to the stars. An attic window banged up ahead, and she heard a rhythmic creaking, and pretended to herself that it was merely the old rocking horse, as big as a real horse and with ivory teeth which haunted her dreams; she shivered, and knew she would not see Charles again tonight.

 He watched her from the corners of his eyes, and his face gave nothing away.

“I’m not afraid of death. In fact,” he said, and this time he turned so that she could see the darkness which pooled in the hollows under his eyes, “It enlivens me. The death of that farmer – “ and he scrutinised her face, eyes narrowed, until he was satisfied that she was as emotionless as he was, “was the spark which lit the touch-paper. My life before that was cold and clinical. It was a sort of _anhedonia_ , and I would have been content with that had I been able to feel content; I suppose it was a – a longing to sequester myself within this private world of logic and order. But with that man’s blood on my hands and shirt, I was reborn. Palingenesia is as glorious as the Stoics would have us believe! The progress of a deathless soul - ”

 He paused, and breathed out, placing his cigarette packet back in his chest pocket. Camilla knew that the target symbol would be above his heart again, and tried not to look. “You haven’t slept, have you?” she asked, words as soft as the mist which gathered around the tree-roots on the edge of the lawn, and he shook his head. She smiled at that, and reached out to run a pale finger down the sleeve of his coat. “I _knew_ something must be up, if you’re quoting John Donne,” and his gaze was impassive, but then he smiled.

“Remember that ridiculous essay of Bunny’s? I wonder if he passed,” and she laughed but did not stop watching him, her eyes sharp despite the muffling darkness.

She pushed her hair out of her eyes, and it felt as heavy in her hands as when she had wrung the blood from it. “ _Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire : « Je m’endors. »_

Her voice in French was less harsh than the beauty of her Greek, and she spoke it with the wobbly assurance of one who knew only a few quotes, and little else, although she was far better than she appeared.

 _“ Et, une demi-heure après_ , ” Henry interrupted, shaking his head ; his pronunciation was surprising, voice low and gravelly. “I worry about that, sometimes. That if I ate a madeleine in the wrong place, I would be struck with an assault of memory, which only repeating the incident could assuage. Those missing hours when we howled with the wolves and tripped on the vines which wound around our feet, when Charles got that awful bite and your hair was soaked in blood – what if we remember them? The miasma of decay and the tombs of those who walked this earth and believed the sun moved around us, and the bones above those of the people who were born to freedom but died as slaves or wearing cheap-cut denim rather than buckskin - twenty years in the future when we are older and our ambitions are just ghosts. What if we want to live like that again, to taste immortality, to _live_ and live freely?” He was breathing heavily, and his cigarette was burning his fingers, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.

“What if it never happens?” she retorted, rolling a pine-cone, stolen from the fireplace in Francis’ front room, in her hands. “If our memories fade until I phone you from Salem with the drumbeat of your heart in my ears and the burn of your fingers on my skin, and wail witchcraft at you, and you do not remember? Or if Francis forgets, and starts dressing respectably, and cutting his hair properly? If they discovered some evidence that could implicate us in Bunny’s death, and we claim to have no memory of it?” She snapped a scale off the pine-cone, and it ripped right down to the base of the cone, as if she were tearing at its skin. “We only remember what we choose to remember,” she said firmly, and set the pine-cone down.

“You’re only saying that,” Henry began, risking a glance towards the open window behind them, “because I know what happened to you that night. I’ve never told anyone, but I know how you sound when someone is kissing your neck, and I _know_ what other marks you were hiding from everyone under that muffler you had to wear,” and he splayed his hand open, until she put her hand across his. The veins in his hand were blue and bright, and he had cut his nails too short again; the skin around his nails was reddened and cracked.

“I don’t know for sure,” she said, and he had to strain to hear, “what happened. I know that Charles would have killed anyone else who kissed me like that, and I know he kissed me. I knew it was him, and I knew – I knew I had to do it, really,” and she looked away, towards the stars.

“The Anglo-Saxons would have called it _mǣġhǣmed_ ,” Henry said, voice warming as he spoke. “And Virgil condemns it; _hic thalamum invasit natae vetitosque hymenaeos_ ,” he added, and she eyed him warily. He picked up the pine-cone, and twisted it until the scales fell like shards of glass into the long grass beneath the bench; an owl screeched in the night.

“The Greeks allowed marriage between a brother and a sister if they had different mothers, but then your mother is dead. _Nefas_ ,” he said suddenly, and Camilla’s face twisted as if she were about to cry. She didn’t – being carved from the same Pentelic marble as the Doric columns of the Acropolis – but she kissed him instead, as if his kiss could wipe out her sins.

 

**Author's Note:**

> "The progress of a deathless soul " - John Donne, written in 1601. Part II of the Infinitati Sacrum "The Progress of the Soule". 
> 
>  
> 
> "Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n'avais pas le temps de me dire : « Je m'endors. »" - Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, published between 1913 and 1927. 
> 
> "hic thalamum invasit natae vetitosque hymenaeos" - Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI. (Contextually speaking of parent-child incest but sssh)


End file.
